How Managing Expectations Helps Prevent Disappointments

Photo by Anna Bass

“Peace begins…when expectation ends.”
~ Sri Chinmoy

I’ve been thinking about how our expectations can color so many of our experiences.

Here we are starting the second half of 2020, and I think it’s safe to say that this year didn’t live up to any of our expectations. And that we are all quite surprised and more than a little disappointed. Even nearly five months in, it still all feels surreal.

As humans, we’re wired to anticipate what is to come, and as a result, we have expectations about nearly everything.

We look down the road and think about what will happen or imagine how things will go in the future, near or far. We certainly didn’t imagine this year to go like this!

With so many plans halted and dreams left unfulfilled, we’ve all had to adjust. The degree to which we’ve been able to do this in large part determines how well we’re weathering this crisis.

We’ve had to be more patient and flexible than we’ve ever been before, not only with the virus, but with those around us as we spend so much time in close proximity.

When it comes to dealing with other people, most of us are not aware of the bulk of our expectations.

We have endless needs, and we look to those closest to us to meet them. It’s human nature to want things to go our way, to the extent they can. But as we learned in last week’s post on perfectionism, the more tightly we hold onto our ideas of how things should be, the harder life is when they don’t turn out that way.

Or I should say the harder we make it, because, much as it may not feel like it, we do have a choice in how we interpret what happens to us.

As Jen Picicci says in her Tiny Buddha article How Expectations Undermine our Relationships and Happiness, “Hoping for the outcome you desire is one thing, trying to force it and being overrun with negative thoughts and feelings when it doesn’t work out is another.”

One of the ways psychotherapists help people is by teaching them that they can change how they feel by changing their thinking. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), as it’s called, is one of the most common forms of psychotherapy. If we think something is truly awful, we’re going to be a lot more distraught than if we think it is just unfortunate. CBT is based on the idea that reframing things can help us calm ourselves and cope better.

One of the benefits of being the youngest in a large family is that I have a whole bevy of seasoned advisors to turn to when I need guidance. When I was struggling with a relationship problem a few years ago, my oldest sister suggested that I lessen my expectations. It was not an easy thing to hear, and I was not in the frame of mind to change my thinking right away. I was holding onto a position that what I was asking of my family member was reasonable. What I wanted was to effect a change in their behavior.

Don’t we find it much easier to look for external solutions rather than to change something about ourselves?

But, over time, I have come to realize how sage her advice was. If you’ve tried everything you can think of to get someone to meet your needs and it still isn’t happening, it’s time to begin the process of learning to accept things the way they are.

I’ll admit that because I’m such a problem-solver, it’s hard at times for me to make that pivot, but I’m making progress. If we learn to manage our expectations, developing our capacity to handle it when things don’t go our way, we can avoid a great deal of disappointment.

Not that we shouldn’t have high standards for ourselves and others, but relaxing the reigns a bit to allow for unforeseen circumstances and events, and especially for other people’s choices, can greatly reduce our frustration.

Say your spouse is really good at and enjoys doing projects around the house, but he generally doesn’t clean up after himself. You’ve asked him to do so, told him that it bothers you, and reminded him many times. Still, the behavior continues.

You can get upset every single time, your anxiety increasing even before he starts in on the next task. Or you can try something else.

Much as you feel that you’re in the right and that he should do as you asked, it is possible to change your thinking about the problem to reduce your stress about it. You can decide to focus on being grateful for all the hard work he does. When he comes in from, say, washing the cars, dripping with sweat, you can assume that he’s probably expended all his energy and is simply too exhausted to do one more thing. You can decide that cleaning up will be your contribution to the task, which lessens your resentment. In the future when he announces he’s starting a project, you can mentally set aside a bit of time later in the day to do the cleanup. You have moved yourself from a position of “He should do it!” to “He’s not likely to so I will choose to do it.”

Now, I’m not in any way advocating letting everyone off the hook. But if you’ve tried your best and a situation is not changing, reframing your expectations can relieve you of ongoing frustration.

Acceptance does not change your desire for something to be different. It just moves you to a place where you can better handle what is.

Similarly, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t hold someone to their word, or that we shouldn’t set firm boundaries when we need to. But, if we’re honest, in many of our interactions, our expectations could be more fluid than we allow them to be in our heads. Especially for things that are arbitrary.

Relationships are difficult because we can’t possibly know all that someone is thinking—their preferences, their biases, their lived experiences. We make assumptions based on what we know, and expect others to “get it.” They do the same with us. To live peacefully, we need to make allowances for them just as they need to make allowances for us.

When I mentioned to my sister this week that I’d been working hard to apply her concept of managing expectations to all of my relationships, her response was: “It lessens our frustration levels and occasionally gives us nice surprises!”

We all know that feeling when something goes better than expected. When we lessen our expectations of others, we have the chance of being pleasantly surprised once in a while when they come through for us in a way we haven’t imagined. 

Affectionately,

Elaine